Last month, it was discovered that the computer networks of the US Democratic National Committee (DNC) had been penetrated by two sets of intruders, who appear to have been unaware of one another’s activities. The hackers seem to have been able to do whatever they liked, including accessing the DNC’s email servers. As a result, some (perhaps most) DNC emails found their way into the public domain via a number of routes, including WikiLeaks.

It’s been dubbed Watergate 2.0. And as in 1972, the key questions are: who were the burglars? What were their motives?

The leaked emails were embarrassing for the DNC in two ways: first, because they revealed that some of its staff had been trying to undermine senator Bernie Sanders, the radical politician who was challenging Hillary Clinton for the party’s nomination; and second, because they revealed the lines of argument with which Democrats were intending to undermine Donald Trump when the election proper got under way.

On 24 July, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, announced her resignation. The leaks caused outrage among Sanders’s supporters, who made their dissatisfaction abundantly clear on the opening day of a convention that was supposed to unanimously confirm Clinton as the party’s nomination for the presidency. So the hacking and the associated leaks had not only unhorsed the head of one of America’s two political parties but also disrupted Clinton’s nominating convention. Some hack, eh?

Needless to say, it’s been dubbed Watergate 2.0, in memory of the burglary of the DNC HQ in June 1972 by people working for Richard Nixon’s campaign team. And now, just as in 1972, the key questions are: who were the burglars? And what were their motives? A number of cybersecurity firms investigated the DNC hacks and concluded that the culprits were two agencies of the Russian government, one the FSB (successor to the KGB), the other Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU. A clinching piece of evidence linking the hack to the Russians was the existence of an internet address in the DNC malware that had also been found in a piece of malware used in a Russian attack on the German parliament’s servers.

So it seems pretty clear that Putin’s lot were the burglars. But what were their motives? Here the conspiracy theories begin. As ever, chronology rules. On 15 June, the DNC strategy for handling Trump was leaked to the Smoking Gun, a website that specialises in publishing embarrassing legal documents, arrest records and police mugshots. On 17 June, WikiLeaks announced that it had mysteriously acquired an 88GB cache of documents that it had encrypted for “insurance” purposes.

On 13 July, selected DNC emails were leaked to the Hill, a politics website. The Republican convention opened on 18 July, with delegates mocking the DNC’s plans for dealing with Trump. Then, on 23 July, WikiLeaks released nearly 20,000 DNC emails, some of them embarrassing for Clinton because of what they reveal about DNC official views of Sanders. The next day, Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned and the day after that the Democratic convention opened, with Sanders’s supporters still furious about the DNC’s treatment of their hero.

A key question in any criminal investigation is: who benefits? Looking at the above chronology, the answer is clear: Donald Trump. Which then leads to a second question: why would agencies of the Russian government wish to undermine Clinton and benefit her opponent? Here the conspiracy theories move up a gear. Trump has boasted of his admiration for Putin as a “strong” leader with whom he can do business. His admiration has been reciprocated by Putin. Trump has also made clear his disdain for Nato as an organisation that enables European nations to have security without paying their fair share of its costs. So if he were president and Putin made aggressive moves against the Baltic states, would he support a strong Nato response? Who knows? But if you were in Putin’s shoes, you’d regard Trump as clearly preferable to Clinton, who is an old-style American hawk.

All of this is pure speculation. What is more interesting about the DNC hack, as Professor Thomas Rid of King’s College, London points out in his thoughtful analysis of the saga, is that it represents a significant shift in Russian military doctrine. They call it “new generation warfare”, a mindset that significantly expands the definition of a military target and what qualify as military tactics.

It’s an approach to conflict that’s “designed to manipulate the adversary’s picture of reality, misinform it, and eventually interfere with the decision-making process of individuals, organisations, governments and societies”. Subtle interference in western elections fits neatly into that mindset. Welcome to the future.